The maintenance of equipment having an electronic element, which is operated remotely from a maintenance facility, can be a problem. This problem can arise with commercial equipment, but in particular with military equipment operational in the field or in any other military theatre such as sea, air or space. Maintenance of such remotely operated equipment depends upon the availability of test equipment and suitably trained personnel. In the field or theatre, such test equipment and personnel are usually non-vital to the operation being carried out by the equipment and their availability to support, test and maintain the equipment will depend upon their being transported to the scene. It will be appreciated that, for example in a war zone, this may often be a hazardous operation, leading to uncertainty of its completion.
Additional issues with support of remotely operated equipment arise from the diversity of such equipment, its complexity and sophistication. To maintain such a variety of equipment is hugely expensive. The following issues in particular can arise. The test equipment can become obsolete when it is required to support old equipment for many years. Field or theatre test systems can have limited flexibility. This can result in a need for many different types of test system to support many types of equipment. Long test and fault finding times, associated with transport of test equipment and personnel to often inaccessible locations, can result in unacceptable delays and costs. Logistical problems of transporting failed equipment back to maintenance bases can result in extensive turnaround times. Very often when a piece of equipment is tested at a test centre no fault is found. This results in even longer delays in getting the equipment back into service at its original location as further diagnostic work will be required to find the real fault and then repair it. Hence long equipment down times often result due to current lengthy fault-to-repair cycles.
End users have specific needs related to different environments. For example the differences in environment between platforms of the navy, fields of operation of the army and theatres of operations of the air force generate totally different test access requirements.
If say, in operations, there are 250,000 different types of line replaceable unit, all with different multiple test requirements, how will it be possible to meet this enormous demand for testing in a more efficient way?
The above are some examples of difficulties, which arise with support, testing and maintenance of field and theatre military equipment.